Cooked

A life and death story about extreme heat, the politics of disaster, and survival by zip code.
With equal parts naivete and requisite chutzpah, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand sets out on a quest to see if America’s disaster preparedness industry could be used to tackle what might be the deadliest man-made disaster of all: extreme poverty. With Chicago’s 1995 heat disaster at its dramatic core -- when 739 Chicago residents, most of them poor, elderly and African American, died over the course of one hot July week -- Cooked asks questions about the politics of disaster every city will have to answer: disaster preparedness for some or community resilience for all?
Inspired by Eric Klinenberg's award winning book Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.